May Already?

I’ve been busy with Master Gardener Camp meetings and Spring Garden Tour work days, so busy that I’ve only worked in my gardens two afternoons.

Yesterday afternoon I picked up some new plants and some bags of composted cow manure – a mandevilla and a dipladenia, neither of which I’ve ever had, so this will be an adventure. The ceramic planters were on sale, but sadly, the flowers were not.

When I got home, I went right to work laying down cardboard in the front flower bed, then emptying all of last year’s soil from Earthboxes and pots into that bed, along with the 6 bags (40 pounds each) of composted cow manure. Underneath all that is last year’s leaves and underneath that is the soil from 2015 container gardening and more leaves. Lasagna gardening and composting, all in one.

I plan to go back tomorrow and pick up more bags of the composted cow manure and hopefully some bags of top soil, along with some cardboard, if I can find some free – all for the other flowerbed in the front. Well, some of the top soil will be for this bed also. And then plants! I have Sweet William started, but they are teeny tiny, nowhere near ready to transplant, so I’m not sure what I’ll do. I can’t quite decide whether to do the Sweet William in the other bed, where the Texas Star hibiscus is, as I know that will self-seed and I won’t have to plant anything else there, of to put it in this bed in front of the holly bushes. I also want to plant some Swiss chard in the front, and maybe some other greens too. Decisions, decisions!

Another decision to make is whether to leave the two trees that we trimmed so drastically last year (or was it two years ago now?). You can see one on the left side of the picture, the other is on the other side of the sidewalk. The other tree has grown back more green along the whole trunk – it obviously gets more sunlight that this one showing here. I hate them both and want them gone. Bill still thinks they add something to the front. One of these days he’s going to look out the window while he’s working in the office and see me attacking them! They will be gone!

2 comments to May Already?

Please tell me more about the cardboard. I was just speculating this morning about maybe using cardboard as a weed block in the new raised beds DH will be building next week. But our soil tends to be overly wet (remember how I killed my rhubarb – one of the raised beds will be for this year’s attempt) so we don’t really need something that will also retain water. And I have a crawl space full of cardboard from our move if you want free cardboard…

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